kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Think I’m getting passed around the Discord or something, I’m getting new followers at a rate disproportionate to my other notes

@bambamramfan said: https://twitter.com/MILFmassacre/status/1673331974583336961

ALT

View on Twitter

Ah okay. Oh, there’s someone in the comments I know from meatspace recognizing me. I kinda wish I had not had the anxiety back for that.

Last time someone I’ve never encountered in my life made one of these out of something I’d written it was a “macro” when Something Awful got hold of like an Anthro paper I’d written about them in like 2002.

Like, I’ll totally agree that California NIMBYs are ridiculous and have committed the state to a poorly chosen path, but I don’t think you guys appreciate how very explicitly central “a civilization where everyone lives in a small-town environment with direct exposure to undeveloped nature” has been to the California Dream

Like before even the postwar Golden Age buildout under Gov. Brown the Elder that really instantiated this suburban paradise, the prewar boom of LA was very commonly framed – embraced by boosters to draw more residents – in terms of a job-rich city that uniquely didn’t have “slum” housing.

(You don’t even hear about “slum clearance” – the postwar practice of demolishing blocks at a time and giving the former residents intentions of something better that much anymore, but large areas of downtown-adjacent land in American cities was hyper-dense and low quality tenements or often formerly comfortable-class housing that had been subdivided all to hell)

California had an idiom for “life at high residential density” – the crowded, warrenlike Chinatowns of LA and especially SF since the Gold Rush, chaotically full of improvised enterprise, drug addiction, and murderous gang violence!

In the early 1980s, Long Beach – the industrialized working class shore to the south of LA, kind of its Queens, was like “ha-HA, we have filled this wonderful location at low bungalow density, time to upzone so as to keep this a functional area for working-class life!”

Of course the thing is the 1980s in Southern California went on to feature a massive illegal immigration wave (Cheech Marin’s 1987 Born in East L.A. is called that because it’s about an American-born bilingual Mexican Angelino experiencing this) which often landed in Long Beach AND the crack- and gang- heavy nadir of South LA-area Black communities.

Which is to say, in actual historical precedent that informs cultural sentiment, dense housing in California (let’s talk *Oakland*) consistently means “the white average-Joe neighborhood becomes overrun with inscrutable, addiction-riven, gang-murderous Others”

And the whole environmental stuff – there’s a clear line from John Muir and the Sierra Club through Paul Erlich and The Population Bomb to the Bay Area types who want to cap tech jobs or the people who worry about water (or road!) use coming from new development that the way to keep properly stewarding the land without exhausting finite resources was to limit population.

You can work racial or wevs angles too, a lot of the West Coast issues with natives and Chinese workers came from the way that the coast’s founding culture really came from a “Free Soil” philosophy, common among smallholders and “mechanics” in the (then-“West”), one of the two strains that went into the Republican anti-slavery stance along Boston moralism (New York, as the major port city of an international economy powered by cotton, was fairly pro-Confederate), that this was supposed to be a country to enable white men’s ability to establish self-sufficient petty dynasties of their own, and that indulging all this nonwhite work – creating a national economy oriented around slave-produced agricultural exports rather than white artisan industrial development, Pacific landowners recruiting natives or Chinese in a labor shortage rather than letting white wages rise so the workers could establish their pioneer fortunes – were, fundamentally, taking their jerbs.

And the pastoralism! This was the pleasant climate where the ranch house really blew up, integrating the outdoors and living area. Backyards – and home gardens – were key.

(In a LOT of ways Portland as I came to it at the dawn of the 2010s suddenly reminded me of things I had read about midcentury LA far closer than the one I saw in the 2000s)

Pete Seeger in 1963, “little boxes made of ticky tacky”, Joni Mitchell in 1970, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, these were laments for greenfield development coming before the activist-driven 1970s downzonings that saw that greenfield development was the ONLY way for California to add housing.

Fucky Culture Prevents Fascism started decades before the 1970s, really.

discoursedrome:

It sounds as if the Wagner situation might have been defused? Anyhow, I liked this story because the modern world is very complicated and this was one of those timeless sorts of things that everyone understands, you could explain it to an ancient Chinese or Roman military advisor and they’d be like “oh yeah that happens a lot, you guys gotta be more careful”

Maybe it was growing up in a “favored quarter” suburb, but if you got into a little old lady’s house when I was a young kid at the turn of the ‘90s there was a shocking probability she had a multi-instrument synthesizer keyboard unit in there, somehow leveraging the organ as a precedent for instrumental emulation for church ladies

etirabys:

etirabys:

internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?

// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner

there’s a person on twitter who’s a friend of a friend through multiple links, shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, “when men have messy apartments I’m like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I’m a little freaked out and I judge them more”

I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn’t have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on.

almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, and they mill around doing things that are not “literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender”. And my axe to grind is that (1) this will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you’re in some New Weird Sexism land, it’s still sexism and you should cut that out.

when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on “literally treat people the same way”. then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn’t possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze the differences and digest them into different treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology

I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men’s asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you’re relaying this so casually – don’t you want her banned? I will if you want.

And he just – didn’t. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn’t mind that much, and he didn’t want her banned just for fairness’s sake. Which was his prerogative. And it was one of many moments when I realized that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with this program that seems obvious to me, which is that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.

(Not that I’ve, you know, gone around with a megaphone and said “HEY, DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK, NAIVELY, THAT WE SHOULD JUST – TRY THIS LITERAL EQUALITY THING –”)

sigh. I’ll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I’ll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this

but. come on! I know this isn’t 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?

Well there’s not consensus over what the form of equal treatment should be. In the 1980s-90s, the view that women should adopt the male practice of accepting petty unwanted sexual aggression with equanimity – which would ALSO represent gender-equalized norms – was very widely attested.

afloweroutofstone:

Russia has basically privatized all of its military operations in Africa over to Wagner in the last few years, so one big question is what now happens to the tens of thousands of Russian mercenaries spread out across like ~5-10 African nations

Wild card in the new Chinese/French/Saudi Scramble for Africa

kontextmaschine:

Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.

Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.

Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge

kontextmaschine:

caesarsaladinn:

rugratfairy:

rugratfairy:

if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality

the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts

try driving through the historic part of Boston and you’ll see that this is true

New England was heavily forested, its major utility on behalf of Britain was producing wood (incl. large old-growth trees for unspliced masts) and sap-derived tar for sealing ships (also ashes for lye production!) it was essentially a EUIV Naval Supplies province.

Like, we chalk “Mongols knew how to tap and drink the blood of horses to sustain themselves in desolate terrain” up to Mongols just being a very horse-centric culture, have you ever thought about what it means that New Englanders make maple syrup by tapping and drinking the blood of trees in snowbound winter?

(re:)

1962!

I could see it, but then supplanted by “Popcorn” in 1969.

cryptotheism:

natalieironside:

People who try to moralize about classical myth are unwittingly acting as a chorus. Discussions are framed and interspersed with rueful cries of “Why is The King so capricious and manipulative? Why is The Queen so vengeful? Why did Death steal that girl away from her mother?”

“You’ve become part of the Greek chorus! You’re taking part in the mythology with your lamentations! Good luck recovering from this one bub!”

kushblazer666:

the montagues and capulets are famously very poor peasant families

The situation was very explicitly one in which an elite descended from a more violent era’s warrior class caused problems in a stable merchant city because they carried weapons around

memecucker:

In Chrétien’s love triangle of Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot, Guinevere consummated her love affair with Lancelot when Arthur and his knights are trying to rescue Guinevere from the land of Gorre. It has been suggested that Chrétien invented their affair to supply Guinevere with a courtly extramarital lover (as requested by his patroness, princess Marie); Mordred could not be used as his reputation was beyond saving, and Yder had been forgotten entirely.[36] This version has become popular. Today it is most familiar from its expansion in the prose cycles, where Lancelot comes to her rescue on more than one occasion.

The Knight of the Cart is believed to have been a story assigned to him by Marie de Champagne, and completed not by Chrétien himself, but by the clerk known as Godefroi de Leigni.[3] A 12th-century French writer usually functioned as a part of a team, or a workshop attached to the court. It is believed that in the production of The Knight of the Cart, Chrétien was provided with source material (or matiere), as well as a san, or a derivation of the material. The matiere in this case would refer to the story of Lancelot, and the san would be his affair with Guinevere. Marie de Champagne was well known for her interest in affairs of courtly love, and is believed to have suggested the inclusion of this theme into the story. For this reason, it is said that Chrétien could not finish the story himself because he did not support the adulterous themes.[4]

So apparently medieval literature had a concept of fan fiction and Lancelot as we know him was the product of Princess Marie commissioning a story where Guinevere fucks a hot guy

prokopetz:

I suspect you could probably draw a line between those posts complaining that what’s being marketed as 1990s nostalgia is really just mislabelled 1980s nostalgia, and those posts remarking that it’s become okay to make fun of the 1950s now because the principal object of reactionary nostalgia is no longer an alternate 1950s with no civil rights movement, but an alternate 1980s with no AIDS crisis.

I think it’s more that the “lost golden age” has been updated from The 50s to The 90s.

At night I light two sticks of rose incense and one of sandalwood before getting into my silk sheets under my down comforter, and I appreciate that all these luxuries would be perfectly familiar millennia ago

bowserwife:

Unfortunately, “be gay, do crimes” caught on not because most of the people saying it were criminals, nor even because they were broadly supportive of crime. In fact, most of them weren’t. It’s just because “crime” is a funny word. Thus is the fate of all radical politics.

femmenietzsche:

So that Rome should not pass the year without war, however, a minor foray was made into Umbria when reports kept arriving of raids on the countryside being made by armed bands from a certain cavern. The Romans entered the cavern with their standards, and in it numerous wounds were inflicted on them because of the darkness of the place, especially from stones that were hurled at them. Eventually, the other entrance to the cavern was discovered—it was open at both ends—and wood was heaped up at both orifices and set alight. As a consequence, up to two thousand armed men were killed inside the cave by the smoke and the heat when, eventually, they rushed straight into the flames in their efforts to get out.

That “up to” is doing a lot of work there I think

Fuckin’ Skyrim-ass encounter

pissvortex:

i think i do remember hearing somewhere that if the primary caregiver of a family goes to prison in north korea then the whole family goes with them so that they stay together as a social unit, but definitely don’t quote me on that because like 90% of what comes out about north korea is completely unable to be verified.

there also seems to be a massive industry of english language NGOs set up in South Korea to take advantage of that fact. they conduct “independent investigations” into human rights abuses in the DPRK and report their findings from these investigations to the U.N., which gives them more access to human rights grants and other massive funds.

the methodology for the investigations published by these NGOs is interviewing and giving surveys to a couple dozen north korean defectors. it pretty much starts and ends there. Yeonmi Park is a pretty notorious example of one of these defectors who found monetary incentive to lie and become a media figure, which is what she did. other defectors also usually aren’t going to have a positive opinion of the country considering they left in the first place (if you don’t count the people who defect back to north korea after living in south korea for a while). it’s not exactly rigorous investigation, and there’s usually not a verifiable way to prove that what they’re saying is true.

in the case of religious stuff specifically, north korea has a long history of being harassed by christian missionaries as well as a christian-led reactionary backlash to the revolution that makes this even more complicated. people seem to think that north korea destroys all christians on sight because they hate God and Freedom and are Satan Loving Communists or some shit but historically christianity has existed in NK entirely as political opposition. i made another post on that here (x)

but generally speaking if you google something and it was first reported in the New York Post it’s safe to assume it’s fake and laugh about it

Kakure Kirishitan - Wikipedia

Prophylactically suppressing children of Christian families in defense against Christianity as an avenue for foreign influence of your East Asian country is a tradition!

testosteronetwunk:

word-for-today:

bedupolker:

bedupolker:

What do you call the genre of image that includes Where’s Waldo and The Garden of Earthly Delights

edit: according to a reply this is a “ Wimmelbilder “

Word for today: wimmelbilder